A lot of students find it difficult to focus on keywords or move their eyes from top to bottom and bottom to top because they are so used to reading texts word for word. This is especially true if the text is perceived as challenging and students feel the need to understand it word for word.

To give the brain an additional impetus to skim and NOT read word for word, ask students to fold in the margins of their text so as to hide a little bit (half an inch or so for an A4 size paper) of the text on either side. By removing the beginning and ending of each line of the text, we are quite literally (I think the use of the word is quite justified here) forcing or tricking the brain into reading only the keywords and forcing top-to-bottom eye movement.

Next time, I’ll talk about a cool technique called mapping the text to divide long texts into more digestible chunks.